Alternation Special Edition No 16 (2015) 259 - 282 259 ISSN 1023-1757

Power, Democracy and Technology: The

Potential Dangers of Care for Teachers in

Higher Education

Vivienne Bozalek

Kathleen Watters

Daniela Gachago

Abstract Internationally, there is a growing interest in the potential of care ethics as a

useful normative framework to evaluate teaching and learning in higher

education. However, to date there has been little engagement with the

inherent dangers of care such as those of paternalism and parochialism. This

is particularly pertinent in the South African context where there are on-going

struggles to find ways of dealing with continuing inequality experienced by

students, who may be at the receiving end of paternalism and parochialism.

This article focuses on interviews conducted with teaching and learning

practitioners collected during a larger national project on the potential of

emerging technologies to achieve qualitative learning outcomes in differently

placed South African higher education institutions. An analysis of the

interviews indicated that while these lecturers were portrayed as innovative

educators, using emerging technologies to enhance their pedagogy, issues of

paternalism and parochialism inevitably affected teaching as a practice of

care. The findings showed that without self-reflexivity and critical

engagement with issues of power and control, including choice of

technology, there exists danger that teaching could be paternalistic, leading to

disempowerment of students and a narrow parochial focusing on the student-

teacher dyad. What also emerged from the findings was that interdisciplinary

teaching and student-led cross-disciplinary learnng has the potential to

mitigate parochialism in the curriculum.

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260

Keywords: ethics of care; dangers of care; parochialism; paternalism;

inequality; higher educators; technology-enhanced-learning

Introduction In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the political ethics of

care as a normative framework. Normative frameworks are generally used to

evaluate commonplace assumptions and underlying values underpinning

social arrangements and for making complex moral judgements about human

flourishing and well-being in various fields and in relation to social issues

(Robinson 1999; Sevenhuijsen 2004). The interest in the political ethics of

care as a normative framework has now been extended to the field of higher

education policies and practices, both globally and locally (see for example

Bozalek & Carolissen 2012; Bozalek & Leibowitz 2012, Bozalek et al. 2014;

Zembylas, Bozalek & Shefer 2014). The political ethics of care can be

regarded as a useful normative framework in higher education for a number

of reasons. Firstly, it provides an alternative lens to the assumption that the

world consists of independent, self-sufficient human beings, recognising that

dependency is an inevitable, central and normal condition in human life.

Secondly, the political ethics of care is based upon a relational ontology that

has as its focus the connections between human beings as well as the

connections between human and nonhuman beings, focusing on the

interconnectedness of humans and the environment. Thirdly, the political

ethics of care foregrounds particularity, embodiedness, vulnerability and the

political contestation of needs, as well as otherness and difference as central

to human existence (Bozalek 2011). In contrast to the aforementioned, rights-

based approaches and traditional social justice theories, as dominant ways of

reasoning, have the ‘rational economic man’ who is disembodied,

autonomous and independent as their normative ideal of a citizen. Fourthly,

traditional social justice and rights-based approaches tend to favour universal

rules, whereas the political and critical ethics of care focus on responsibilities

(Donovan & Adams 2007). These considerations of the political and critical

ethics of care make it a useful framework to think about social inequalities in

the higher education arena globally (Mahon & Robinson 2011), but even

more so in our local context, in which severe social inequalities continue to

prevail. In considering the usefulness of care as a normative framework, it is

important to distinguish between approaches which have as their focus family

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or dyadic relationships (see e.g. Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984; 2005; 2004;

and Ruddick 1989), and those which focus on public, policy, institutional and

global issues (Bozalek et al. 2014a; Robinson 2011; Zembylas et al. 2014). It

is the latter approaches (i.e. the political ethics of care which focuses on

macro issues) within the South African higher education context which will

be the focus of this paper.

The contribution that this particular paper makes is its focus on what

has been termed by Joan Tronto (1993; 2011; 2013) as the dangers or

problems of care as a normative lens. In particular, we look at the problems

of care in relation to teaching and learning in South African higher education

institutions. While the ethics of care has been used as a normative lens to

analyse professional development in teaching and learning (Bozalek et al.

2014a; Engelmann 2009), feminist critical citizenship in higher education

(Bozalek & Carolissen 2012), assessment practices (Bozalek et al. 2014b)

and institutional arrangements (Bozalek & Leibowitz 2012; Tronto 2010),

there is a paucity of literature on the dangers of care, particularly as it

pertains to higher education. Tronto (1993; 2011; 2012) is the prominent

author who has identified both paternalism and parochialism as constituting

the dangers of care, and we will mainly be focusing on her work in this article

in relation to how caring practices such as teaching and learning in higher

education can inadvertently fall into the trap of parochialism and paternalism

(Robinson 1999). Consequently, this paper’s specific contribution is making

explicit the dangers of care pertaining to teaching and learning in higher

education that have not been extensively written about.

In order to examine how these dangers of care - viz. parochialism and

paternalism - play out in South African higher educators' teaching and

learning practices with emerging technologies, this paper uses data from in-

depth interviews from a larger national research project. In this project we

explored the potential of emerging technologies, which are often, although

not always, located outside the institutional realm and hence transfer the

locus of control to the learners and the educator, to transform the educator’s

teaching and learning practices (see for example Bozalek, Ng’ambi &

Gachago 2013; Bozalek et al. 2013; or Gachago et al. 2013). Here we

investigate in more depth the relationship between the choice of technology

and its locus of control, level of expert knowledge, and interdisciplinary

teaching within a political ethics of care framework. In particular we show

how interdisciplinary teaching and learning creates spaces of vulnerability,

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both for lecturers and learners (Leibowitz et al. 2010; Leibowitz et al. 2011;

Mackenzie, Rogers & Dodds 2014) and can offer a democratic and

empowering approach – potentially mitigating parochialism. The paper also

demonstrates that while academics set out with the best intentions regarding

how their educational practices impact on students, this may not be enough to

achieve human flourishing and qualitative educational outcomes. As a

practice of care, teaching involves more than good intentions. According to

Tronto (1993: 136), ‘It requires a deep and thoughtful knowledge of the

situation and of all the actors’ situations, needs and competencies’. Thus self-

reflexivity is a crucial practice to diminish paternalistic tendencies in

teaching and learning.

The paper is structured in the following way: we first provide an

explication of the theoretical framework we use in this article and then briefly

discuss the research methodology that was used. Thereafter, we present the

findings, and explain the model we developed from analysing the findings,

using the political ethics of care as an analytical lens. We then discuss the

findings and develop some conclusions from the findings.

Care as a Practice and Disposition Tronto (1999; 2013) sees care as both a practice and a disposition, which is

different from the way Gilligan (1982), Noddings (1984) and Ruddick (1989)

have viewed care. Tronto and Berenice Fisher describe care in the following

way:

At the most general level, care consists of everything we do to

continue, maintain, and repair our world so that we may live in it as

well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our

environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-

sustaining web. (Fisher & Tronto 1990 in Tronto 1993: 103)

We see university teaching with technology as a practice of care, which can

either be done well or badly, depending on how the moral elements of care

described by Tronto (1993) are integrated into teaching with technology.

Tronto is unique in her identification of four phases of care with their

associated moral elements in her earlier work, and has more latterly added a

fifth phase of care (Tronto 2013). The phases of care and their associated mo-

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ral elements are the following:

1. Caring about - this is where the need for care is identified. The

associated moral element of this first phase is attentiveness.

2. Caring for - once a need is recognised, it should be acted upon - the

associated moral element with this second phase is responsibility.

3. Caregiving - the actual hands-on process of giving care - the

associated moral element is competence.

4. Care receiving - the ways in which the recipient of care responds to

the care received - the corresponding moral element is

responsiveness.

5. Caring with - the reiterative process of care which is the fifth phase

recently added by Tronto (2013). The moral qualities of trust and

solidarity are developed through the reliance of others on care and

the caring of relational beings with each other.

For a political ethics of care, all of the abovementioned phases and their

moral elements would need to be present and the integration of these phases

in teaching approaches would also need to be present.

Paternalism and Parochialism: The Dangers of Care

Paternalism Tronto (1993) cautions against the dangers of care which includes

paternalism and parochialism. She sees paternalism as stemming from the

powerful position that a caregiver holds in relation to a care receiver in

meeting the latter’s needs. The caregiver may thus have an overdeveloped

sense of his or her own importance in solving problems leading to the

caregiver assuming that he or she is all knowing about the needs of the

recipient of care. Ultimately, the recipient of care (the student in our case)

becomes infantilised in the relationship. As Tronto (1993: 170) puts it,

'especially when the care-givers' sense of importance, duty, career, etc., are

tied to their caring role, we can well imagine the development of

relationships of profound inequality'. From our perspective in this article, this

would mean that if a teacher in higher education as a caregiver is

overconfident in 'knowing' or deciphering the students' needs, students may

in the process become infantilised and relationships of inequality may be an

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inevitable result of such a situation.

In addition to considerations of paternalism from a political ethics of

care perspective, paternalism has also been considered by bioethicist Tom

Beauchamp (2010) and economist Esther Duflo (2012). Beauchamp is

concerned that paternalism in health care intentionally limits the autonomy of

individuals without their consent, by taking decisions on their behalf, and

overriding their preferences for 'their own good'. Duflo (2012), in her Tanner

lecture on 'Paternalism vs Freedom?', refers to paternalism as providing for

people's basic needs without consulting them about what their needs are,

overriding people's freedom on the understanding that those in power know

better. Yet Duflo (2012) shows that for the poor, having the state take basic

decisions on their behalf makes them more rather than less free, in that they

are less exploited and more protected by the state in terms of their basic

needs. She provided the example of water, noting that those who are deprived

of such a basic necessity in life do not need to be consulted about whether

they want it or not.

Michael Slote (2007) in his discussion on paternalism in care ethics

observes that in some cases, such as insisting on riding a motorcycle with a

helmet, paternalism may be acceptable in a person’s best interests to prevent

damage to him or herself. One could argue similarly in the field of teaching

and learning in higher education that in some cases, the educator may

through the connectivity of his/her relationship with the student, be able to

intervene in a student’s best interests regarding his/her educational trajectory

in an empathetic manner.

The decision-making processes in education - who is involved and

who is excluded - are important to consider with regards to paternalism

(Tronto 2011). With paternalism, decisions are taken by the caregiver or

those in power (teachers, managers) on behalf of the care-receivers

(students). In this paper, we define democracy as students’ ability to be part

of the decision-making process regarding their learning, and their ability to

participate on an equal footing in this regard. Students’ participation in their

own learning would alter power relations between lecturers, students and

their institutional contexts.

In the South African context where many students do not have access

to basic resources, paternalism regarding provision of resources to meet the

aforementioned needs may be necessary. For example, many students find it

difficult to study because they do not have access to transport or food, and

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institutional provision of such resources should be regarded as a basic

necessity. However, once basic needs are met students should participate in

democratic decision-making processes regarding their learning needs.

Parochialism With regard to parochialism, Robinson (1999; 2011) sees the danger of care

being relegated to the private or intimate sphere of life. It is for this reason

that political care ethicists such as Tronto (1993) and Slote (2007) are critical

of authors such as Nel Noddings and Sara Ruddick, who base their notions of

care exclusively on dyadic mother to child relationships. Additionally,

Noddings’ exclusion of distant others in her conception of care (Slote 2007)

is troubling, as higher education teaching can involve more than two people

and can also traverse geographical contexts and disciplines.

The parochial and partial nature of care, which focuses only on those

close to us rather than distant others or little known strangers, makes human

rights-based critics of care sceptical about its usefulness as a normative

framework. These critiques are addressed by political care ethicists (Tronto

1993; 2011; 2013; Robinson 1999; 2011; Sevenhuijsen 2004; Slote 2007)

who conceptualise care beyond private/public binaries and see it as

concerning human flourishing more generally, as can be seen, for example in

Fisher and Tronto’s (1993) definition of care. To care only for those near to

one, would in Tronto's (2013) consideration, be a form of privileged

irresponsibility, in that it would exclude a concern for more distant others.

Iris Young's (2011) notion of a socially connected responsibility also

encourages a morality which links responsibility for issues of social justice

across distances to institutional and structural relations which are socially

connected and affect all, thus breaking free of a parochial form of care and

social justice.

Parochialism can also be seen as a narrow focus on disciplinary and

geographic contexts, in contrast to what Bob Lingard and Amanda Keddie

(2013) call deparochialised pedagogies. A deparochialised pedagogy would

be one which has the global citizen in mind and which assumes a

cosmopolitan and transcultural teacher, who is able to go beyond the local

and national, while keeping a connection to it, and to traverse the local and

global.

Interdisciplinarity and peer and team teaching can create spaces to

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266

address the narrowness of disciplinary boundaries and of dyadic teacher-

student relationships. This would serve to broaden perspectives and

worldviews, and allow participants to question taken for granted assumptions,

and recognise their vulnerabilities.

Paternalism and Parochialism in the Phases of Care The integrity of care assumes that each phase of care and each associated

element is done well – caring about (attentiveness), caring for

(responsibility), care-giving (competence), care receiving (responsiveness)

and caring with (trust and solidarity). If responsibility is foregrounded above

the other elements then there may be a tendency for the pedagogical (caring)

practice to be patronising, as the caregiver (teacher) assumes too much

responsibility for the caregiving (teaching), leaving little responsibility and

diminished agency for the care-receiver (student).

In terms of the phases of care, the problems of paternalism and

parochialism can be understood as distortions of the kinds of responsibilities

that people should appropriately assume (Tronto 2011). For paternalists, the

problem is that they claim too much authority in the allocation of

responsibility for themselves. In these instances, the integrity of care is

compromised as the phases are out of kilter and the educator is assuming

responsibility in problematic ways. In addition to this, the caregiver does not

pay attention to what the care receiver is expressing regarding their needs,

but assumes that they know better as an expert what the care-receiver's needs

are. In the case of parochialism, the lecturer sees only him or herself as being

responsible, or views the relationship as dyadic rather than including other

experts and other students in the process of learning. Thus the phases and

moral elements of care are out of sync in instances of paternalism and

parochialism.

Methodology This study follows a qualitative research paradigm. It draws data collected as

part of a larger study that was funded by the South African National Research

Fund (NRF) to investigate how emerging technologies can be used to

improve teaching and learning in the higher education sector. During the

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months of August and September of the year 2011, a survey was sent to all

public higher education institutions (HEIs) in South Africa to establish the

use of emerging technologies by academics and support staff to improve

teaching. There were 262 responses with representation from twenty-two

public HEIs in South Africa.

A subset of the twenty responses submitted was selected for in-depth

face-to-face interviews. The semi-structured interviews were conducted by

five members of the NRF project team, three of whom are authors of this

paper. The interviews focused on the rationale, design, impact, and

challenges of the individual teaching intervention(s) using emerging

technologies and lecturers’ underlying teaching and learning beliefs.

The interviews were transcribed and were analysed using Tronto's

phases of care and their associated five elements – viz. caring about

(attentiveness), caring for (responsibility), care-giving (competence), care-

receiving (responsiveness) and caring with (trust). The integrity of care – how

well each phase is done and how well they are done together– as well as a

focus on power and vulnerability provided useful markers to judge the

pedagogical practices (see for example Bozalek et al. 2014a). To foreground

the lecturer’s voice in our findings, lengthy quotes are included. Based on a

political and critical ethics of care analysis we created a framework based on

two dimensions (paternalism vs democratic teaching and parochialism vs

peer-to-peer learning and inter-disciplinary teaching). Seven of the interviews

were selected to exemplify these elements and excerpts will be presented in

the findings.

Ethical approval was sought and granted through the appropriate

institutional channels and participants gave informed consent to participate in

the study. To guarantee anonymity, participants’ names were changed where

necessary.

Use of Emerging Technologies in Teaching and Learning in

Higher Education The seven cases that formed part of this study were drawn from a larger

project in which higher educators reflected on their use of emerging

technologies in higher education, as we have indicated in the methodology

section. In this project we used Veletsianos’ (2010) definition of emerging

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technologies, which emphasises contextuality - useful in our own context

characterised by differently positioned institutions in terms of human and

financial resources. It is important to note, that emerging includes both

technologies and practices that are deemed ‘emerging’ or innovative in a

specific context. Those technologies which are ubiquitously used by students

in their everyday lives such as social media or instant messaging provide

better opportunities to democratise learning. This has the effect of providing

tools which are outside institutional and the educators’ control (Bozalek,

Ng’ambi & Gachago 2013). We argue that the loss of control and openness

on the part of the teachers in higher education can work against paternalism

and parochialism.

These seven cases employ emerging technologies/practices in the

following way:

1. A blended learning course for MPhil health science students in a

research-intensive historically advantaged HEI where face-to-face

sessions are combined with online learning. During the online

learning phase students keep their own blog for weekly reflections.

The course facilitators take the conscious decision to use web-based

tools that are openly available, to allow students to participate in an

authentic context. The course facilitator keeps a course blog, to

model reflective writing (BPJ).

2. A first year undergraduate social work course in a comprehensive

HEI where the blog tool of the Learning Management System was

used for e-journals through which students reflected on both personal

issues and challenges encountered in their studies as well as issues

discussed in teaching. These e-journals are accessible only to the

individual student and the lecturer who reads these blogs and gives

feedback (BVA).

3. An online Education PHD reading group on a Learning Management

System at a research intensive historically advantaged HEI which is

used to share and discuss readings (KMS).

4. The use of Google Drive in a second year Physiotherapy course at a

historically disadvantaged HEI, to facilitate the co-construction of

collaborative lecture notes by students (RM).

5. The use of blogs to document and reflect the adaptive management of

a fish tank with first year Natural Science students at a historically

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disadvantaged HEI (KR).

6. A non-credit bearing module for medical students in a research-

intensive historically advantaged HEI where the students reflect

through the use of multimedia on their first often traumatic

experiences in the maternity ward, with a particular focus on human

rights abuse (MV).

7. Use of closed Facebook groups to connect social work students from

a historically disadvantaged HEI with students from an institution of

higher learning based in the US to allow for formal and social

communication, discussion and collaboration (RJ).

For a more in-depth description of these emerging practices and tools see for

example Bozalek et al. (2013) or Brown and Gachago (2013).

Findings In this section we discuss the themes that emerged when analysing the

interviews using a framework derived from a political ethics of care.

Democratisation vs Paternalism Examining our data, we found differences in power relations between

lecturers and students. Where there were more equitable power relations

between a student and an expert lecturer, the student was able to maintain

his/her agency and his/her status as a full human being rather than being

infantilised, as is the case in paternalistic relationships. One of the

interviewees for example reported seeing his students as vibrant participants

with some element of choice regarding their educational practices, thus an

example of democratic practice. He explained how, in his adaptive

management fish project in a first year Natural Science course, students are

able to select their own groups and given the space to find their own solutions

to unexpected circumstances. Furthermore, students become invested enough

in the learning process by taking responsibility for their own learning as

shown below:

They are active participants in the process; it’s no longer a passive

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exercise. They self-select [their groups], I don’t like to impose those

things (KR).

One of the other things is that we also tried to build in the idea of

responsibility so that if they’re given a fish it now becomes their

responsibility. And in many cases we don’t tell them to do it, but if

the fish has died in every case they found a replacement. We give

them so much food, in every case, every single case the students have

found, sourced other food (KR).

The following quotes by two lecturers, on the other hand, are examples of

assumptions about students which may lead to a reduction in democratic

processes, diminishing student agency. Here, lecturers are inclined to project

their own assumptions onto students of what they perceive students’ needs

and expectations to be. The first quote below shows a lecturer’s generalised

labelling of students as poor and rural and the second a lecturer’s assumptions

of the sorts of expectations that a student has and who has travelled from far.

While not necessarily misinterpreting students’ learning needs, these

educators do assume that they know what is best for the students involved:

Many of our students come from very poor home backgrounds and

also do not have the best educational backgrounds in terms of their

formative schooling. And so my teaching philosophy is a very

developmental one1 (RJ).

I think it’s also the sort of sense that people are taking a week out of

busy lives, they are paying , flying to [campus], driving to [campus],

paying for their accommodation – I want to make sure that they don’t

feel like that was a waste of time. So it’s a bit of a balancing act

between recognising that they’re PhD scholars and that they actually

need to drive it, and recognising that this whole academic writing

doesn’t come naturally (KMS).

The examples above reflect the complexity of paternalism - as Duflo (2012)

1 By developmental the respondent is referring to a social change and social

justice perspective.

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indicates paternalism is in some instances essential for providing for basic

needs - in this case for a conducive learning environment. While these

lecturers appeared to go out of their way to sensitise themselves to the

students' needs, in other cases lecturer attitudes could be regarded as

problematic in that they may be experienced as putting everyone in the same

category, and as pre-emptive and limiting in terms of agency and choice, as

shown in the following quote. Here the lecturer regards the sharing of

resources from State financial assistance to family members as problematic.

Many of our students take their Wizard card2 that they get, which is

supposed to be used for buying food and books and they buy stuff and

they sell it and send the money home (BVA).

Unequal Power Relationships and the Importance of Dialogue To avoid such pre-emptive positions, dialoguing with students about what

their needs actually are would be necessary. Teaching, as any caring practice,

is defined by power dynamics, and generally it is the caregiver who is in a

powerful position, with the care receiver being a supplicant in the process.

This is why a political ethics of care as developed by Tronto, Sevenhuijsen,

Robinson etc. emphasises the necessity for dialogue between these parties.

The following quotes refer to the importance of dialogue between students

and lecturer, but also among students themselves in creating an enabling

learning environment.

….what we’re finding what’s fantastic about the module is we’ve

designed it to be agile, adaptable. And we get a lot of feedback from

students and staff and we make changes all the time; every case

we’ve run has been run slightly differently – because we want the

students to feel like they have some ownership of the module, that

their input matters – so we do try and make changes based on their

feedback. But we don’t only take what they say because a lot of the

things that they ask for we specifically designed to not do it that way

(RM). 2 Card issued for those receiving financial assistance from the Department of

Higher Education and Training.

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Protectionism and Expert Knowledge vs Student-led Learning Protection or the need to protect someone perceived as more vulnerable than

others or self is part of paternalism and is another way in which good care

may be compromised. Teachers may feel that they need to protect students by

being prescriptive about technologies they can use, by keeping their work out

of the public domain, by prescribing texts rather than allowing students to

discover their own sources of knowledge, by controlling the assessment

process, by encouraging compliance and by being the central or pivotal

person for any potential questions and uncertainties.

In the example below the lecturer provides the reading as well as the

analysis of the reading using Power Point, leaving little space for students to

develop their own voice or to feel comfortable to contribute new

interpretations of the readings:

...that’s what I’ve done for my meetings as well as I have prepared

Power Points. So we’ll do a reading beforehand and then at a certain

time whoever wants to can come into the discussion forum to discuss

that reading. And then I’ll have prepared a PowerPoint of key point

bullets or questions for reading. And then I sort of think maybe I

manage it too much; maybe I should just shut-up more (KMS).

…. think maybe I’m posting too many things so my voice is too

dominant. But I’ve asked and people say no; and interestingly when I

don’t post for a few days because I’m away, I’ll get an email saying:

Oh, you didn’t post anything and there were such good articles in the

Mail & Guardian, I thought you were going to post some of them

(KMS).

The above quote is interesting as it shows that just as in a face-to-face

classroom where a teacher dominates the discussion, it is also possible that

this happens with social media and other forms of technology. Despite

conscious desires to avoid paternalism, the asymmetrical relationship (Caze

2008, Young 1997) of the caregiver and care-receiver (teacher and student)

can mitigate the power asymmetry (Beasley & Bacchi 2007). Often the

hierarchical relationship in care and the ways in which care and power

undermine egalitarian relationships is not sufficiently acknowledged (Beasley

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& Bacchi 2007). The above quote shows that this lecturer is aware that her

approach may provide too much structure, by being too dominant, and that

this may have the effect of silencing students' voices. This highlights the

importance of continuous self-reflexivity and the difficulty of breaking out of

established patterns of practice and power relationships. The following quote

shows an alternative more democratic approach to sourcing readings for a

course, in this case:

We do have core readings … so there are readings to help them

along. But the model is definitely exploratory and discovery. One

definite part of the reflection is just to get them going they must find

at least one scholarly article that’s interesting to them around … and

they must talk about it on their blog and reflect on it in an academic

way (BPJ).

The presumption that teachers possess all of the expert knowledge is a

problematic one according to Tronto (2012). Transparency is necessary for

student agency in the learning process. This transparency relates to the

acquisition of knowledge and to the evaluation of knowledge acquisition and

teaching. Transparency can lead to a more democratic teaching and learning

context. This involves peer teaching and moving away from seeing the

lecturer as the only source of knowledge. We can be both givers and receivers

of care – in other words, as lecturers we can learn and as students we can

teach.

This lecturer, for example, allows students to participate in the

teaching process:

I totally let the so-called knowledgeable students assist – I mean, they

do, they just jump in. They would sometimes be working later at night

than I am – so there would be a question and Frans would just jump

in and the next morning I would see, [laughter in voice] okay, good,

great, that’s way better than I could ever say it. So that really is my

style (BPJ).

In the following examples, the first lecturer encourages students to create and

find their own knowledge although he is an expert in the area being

researched. The second example shows how a lecturer uses student-generated

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notes in his teaching, rather than providing lecture notes. It also shows the

importance of modelling and guidance – referred to earlier as transparency in

knowledge acquisition.

Too often what I see in courses is we [the lecturers] will design, tell

you how to do a poster, but they [students] are not working with their

own information. What we’re trying to do is that students have their

own personal information which they turn into knowledge and

they’re learning to share the knowledge through blogs (KR).

What we try to do is the students or in their groups they

collaboratively construct their own notes. And so we expect them to

provide citation; and then the facilitators actually go to those sources

and give the students input on whether or not they think that it’s a

relevant source, if not why not. So we try and help guide the students

but some of the feedback that we get from the students is that it’s

actually incredibly challenging to go and do that (RM).

Recognition of Vulnerability and Interdependence It is also important to acknowledge the interdependence of lecturers and

students. This would mean that lecturers themselves should be conscious of

their own vulnerability and bring this into their pedagogical practice, rather

than seeing themselves as expert and independent and concentrating only on

the vulnerability of the students.

We have found in the analysis of the interviews that teaching in a

different discipline from one’s own, which we define as cross-disciplinary,

tends to make educators more aware of their own assumptions and certainties

about their knowledge sets. The reflexive stance makes them more aware of

their own limitations and vulnerability and thus better able to respond to the

learners’ needs. This may serve to present teachers in higher education as less

intimidating and more approachable for care-receivers, in this case the

students. We have seen in our examples of cases that those who are experts,

even though they do not promote themselves as such, often unwittingly

inhibit responses from care-receivers (students) in that students may defer to

superior knowledge and feel afraid to initiate conversations. The first two

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quotes refer to a lecturer's experience of vulnerability, one where she did not

know about her student recording and posting a confidential role play enacted

in a workshop on YouTube, being unaware of the consequences thereof, and

her openness to learn from the student’s unintentional breach of

confidentiality to provide future learning for the students. The second quote

shows her reflecting about how technology has assisted her to gain access to

knowledge and at the same time increased her sensitivity towards others,

which can be seen in her responsiveness towards students' needs in the

interview. This is also an example of how teaching and learning with certain

technologies such as social media may make the process more risky and

lecturer more vulnerable. This lecturer was teaching outside of her field of

expertise as an associated health professional to obstetrics and gynaecology

medical students:

One of our first abuse workshops, one of the students was taking

photos and I didn’t realise that he was actually taking a video that he

subsequently posted on YouTube and I only found out eight months

later that this was on YouTube. Fortunately he’s a very responsible

student, there was no indication of the university, there were no

names provided, but it’s there on YouTube. And so I actually now use

that YouTube clip for presentation, and it’s been an interesting

process for me as a teacher how I felt first when I heard about it and

then knowing that my classroom experience was posted on YouTube

without my permission and I found that quite unsettling and I think

maybe that’s why I got interested in talking about professionalism in

social media – I gave my first workshop to first year students a

couple of weeks ago about their online digital identity and what that

means (MV).

I have a little impairment and so technology has changed my life for

me because material that wasn’t accessible to me is now accessible,

so it’s just lifted me to a whole new space and put me on an even

footing with other people, where before I would want to explore

something and just couldn’t because even just finding books in the

library was always difficult because I couldn’t see what was on other

shelves and reading (MV).

Vivienne Bozalek, Kathleen Watters & Daniela Gachago

276

Parochialism/ Dyadic vs Peer-to-peer Learning/ Team

Teaching Another danger that Tronto (1993) identifies is parochialism, a narrow vision

of patronising care for one’s own near at hand relatives, which is often a

critique which those who support justice or human rights perspectives level

against the ethics of care, as care tends to concentrate on a concern for those

who are close to the caregiver. This is why Tronto and other care ethicists,

such as Kittay, Robinson, and Sevenhuijsen, insist upon the ethics of care

being integrated with politics, democracy and the integrity of care. Politics

extends care beyond the dyadic and private mother and child relationships, to

the public domain, to look at policies, institutions and social practices which

are beyond the individual. Some of the consequences of using a political

ethics of care is that we should not assume that as teachers in higher

education we need to have dyadic relationships with students, and that we are

the only ones who can participate in the educative process - students as peers

can also assist each other and students too have the capacity to look for

relevant knowledge and to assess themselves in this process, as shown in the

next set of quotes.

We have about eight facilitators in the classroom at any one time…

one of the biggest challenges we find is that there’s contradiction in

consistency where one group will be told this is very important and

another group is told, no, that’s not all that important. And instead of

saying this is a huge problem, we’re saying to the students, well, this

is what the real world is like; you can have clinicians who will

disagree on appropriate management strategies for patients, and

how do you negotiate kind of a compromise between what you think

is right and what someone thinks is right. So we do try and model

that and what we’ll often do is students will ask me a question and

I’ll say, ‘Well, this is what I think, but let me just grab this other

person who I know has a different view,’ and we’ll pull that

facilitator into the conversation and then we discuss the difference in

the viewpoint and model to the students that oftentimes there is no

right answer (RM).

So it will be a group and they probably wouldn’t identify themselves

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as the leaders because it’s just a group of people all doing their

PhDs in our programme and they need to talk, but I can sort of see

that these women are being hugely helpful. And the one woman in

Johannesburg has set up a system of critical readers for each other

(KMS).

These examples show boundary-crossing, peer-to-peer learning and inter-

disciplinary teaching facilitated through the use of emerging technologies,

which allow for online communication collaboration beyond disciplinary and

institutional boundaries. In the following quotes, the lecturer gives examples

of how peers support each other, often in a more efficient, authentic way than

a lecturer does, and in this case, positioned as non-experts. The course

referred to in this example is in the medical health sciences and the educator

is a technology expert, rather than someone from medical health sciences:

Interviewer: Do you find that that support happens within disciplines

or is it geographically based for example?

BPJ: No, not at all; it’s across disciplines. Where it’s in discipline

it’s usually sort of stronger because it’s more obvious – it’s around

how do we teach measuring for wheelchair alignment, because that

was one specific module one was developing. So I can’t really

comment. I can comment on the technologies but the other one will

say, ‘Listen, this is actually very good and it’s needed.’ And the

others would say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, we don’t do that but we

have this thing and we can also use it in this way’.

The aforementioned quote is a good example of how a technology expert who

was teaching a module in medical health sciences managed to use the

expertise of peers in his group to interact with important content to do with

medical health issues, as he felt as a facilitator he could not contribute to the

discussion. Thus the role of the non-expert as facilitator can encourage more

participation and ownership of the learning process among participants.

Conclusion This study looked at higher education practitioners’ responses to student

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needs through a political ethics of care lens. After analysing seven of the in-

depth interviews gathered in a national project on the use of emerging

technologies for teaching and learning from a political ethics of care

perspective, we were struck by the different approaches to care that these

higher education practitioners took. To understand the impact of lecturer

assumptions and practices on the learning experience, it is important to pay

attention to the problems or dangers of care viz. paternalism and

parochialism. These concepts can be used to identify how paternalism can be

addressed through participatory parity, and how in some instances, regarding

basic needs and through a connectedness with students’ learning needs, a

paternalistic approach may be justified. A cognisance of one’s own

vulnerability as an educator seems necessary to avoid regarding the students

from a deficit perspective.

The findings helped us recognise the importance of self-reflexivity

when engaging in practices of care when teaching. Like any other practices of

care, teaching is inevitably in danger of succumbing to the problematic sides

of care – parochialism and paternalism. To be cognisant of these dangers of

care, teachers in higher education may need to constantly re-evaluate their

assumptions about teaching as a practice and the constituents of 'good care'.

We are not arguing against care as such, as we regard teaching as a practice

of care. However, the use of the moral elements of care – attentiveness,

responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust, and the integrity of

these elements – can help to guard against the inequalities of the teaching

situation. This may help to send warning signals regarding for example,

taking too much responsibility for the caring process (teaching). Good care

which is informed by the ethics of care may even, from a politicised

perspective, seem counter-intuitive. To be overly responsible for one's

students, for example, or to engage only in dyadic relationships may fall into

the traps of paternalism and parochialism. Based on our findings, the dangers

of care may be lessened when the teaching process involves cross-

disciplinary and multiple participants. Furthermore, being a non-member of a

discipline as a teacher and facilitator makes one more vulnerable and perhaps

better able to respond to the learners’ needs. It also makes one less

intimidating and more approachable for care-receivers, in this case the

students. The choice of technology and the affordances of tools could also

impact on providing a democratic and empowering way of teaching. While

some technologies support a teacher-centred expert-driven interaction

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between teacher and students, others are far more democratic and allow

learners to take control and ownership of their own learning. These are all

dimensions which temper the inequalities inherent in current higher education

learning spaces.

Further research from a student's perspective is needed to understand

the learning experiences of students from not only the personal, but also the

social and political dimensions using a political ethics of care lens.

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DOI:10.1080/09540253.2014.901718.

Vivienne Bozalek

Social Work and Director of Teaching and Learning

University of the Western Cape

vbozalek@uwc.ac.za

Kathleen Watters

Research Associate

University of the Western Cape

watterslife@gmail.com

Daniela Gachago

Centre for e-Learning

Cape Peninsula University of Technology

gachagod@cput.ac.za